news20090624BRT

[Biography of the Day] from [Britannica]
June 24
Jack Dempsey
Born this day in 1895 was American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who held the world title from 1919, when he knocked out Jess Willard, until 1926, when he lost a 10-round decision to Gene Tunney.

[On This Day] from [Britannica]
June 24
1812: Russia invaded by Napoleon and his Grand Army
On this day in 1812, French Emperor Napoleon—who had massed his troops in Poland in the spring to intimidate Russian Tsar Alexander I—and 600,000 troops of his Grand Army launched an ill-fated invasion of Russia.

1948: The Berlin blockade intensified when the Soviet Union announced that the Western Allied powers no longer had any rights in Berlin.

1932: The Promoters Revolution, a bloodless coup, overthrew Prajadhipok, the king of Thailand, ending the absolute monarchy in that country and initiating the so-called Constitutional Era.

1859: The Battle of Solferino, the last engagement of the second War of Italian Independence, was fought in Lombardy.

1821: South American patriots under Simón Bolívar defeated Spanish royalists on the plains near Caracas, Venezuela, in the Battle of Carabobo.

1795: William Smellie, the Scottish compiler of the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, died in Edinburgh.

1519: Theodore Beza, an author, translator, educator, and theologian who assisted and later succeeded John Calvin as a leader of the Protestant Reformation centred at Geneva, was born.

1497: John Cabot became the first European to set foot in North America since the Vikings.


[Today's Word] from [Dr. Kazuo Iwata]
June 24
In each human heart are a tigger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
Ambrose Birece (born this day in 1842)
（どの人間の心の中にも、虎と、ぶたと、ろばと、夜鳴きうぐいすが住んでいる。性格の多様なのは、それらの活動が同じようでないからである。）

news20090624JP1

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[BUSINESS NEWS]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Rising social security outlays won't be reined in
Election ploy or is it goodbye to Koizumi curbs?
By TAKAHIRO FUKADA
Staff writer

Prime Minister Taro Aso's Cabinet endorsed budget guidelines Tuesday that will not cut automatic growth in social security spending in fiscal 2010.

The decision not to trim the annual increase marks a departure from the policy initiated in 2006 by then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who spearheaded economic reforms that until now have been upheld by his successors.

At a news conference in the evening, Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano indicated the government may pay for the spending increase by issuing government debt.

The natural growth in social security spending factors in annual rises in various economic indicators, such as inflation and the increasing number of pension recipients.

Under the plan, ¥220 billion was to be cut every year until fiscal 2011.

Had that curb not been introduced, social security outlays would have risen by ¥870 billion in fiscal 2009, the Finance Ministry said.

Economists called the latest move a ploy by the Liberal Democratic Party-New Komeito ruling bloc to garner public support ahead of the next Lower House election, which must be held by fall.

They also voiced concern that the loosened fiscal discipline will have a negative impact on daily life, lower economic growth, and lead to tax increases and higher long-term interest rates.

LDP General Council Chairman Takashi Sasagawa quoted Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano as saying in a memorandum to party executives on Monday that he will accept the growth in social security costs in the fiscal 2010 budget.

"In short, there will not be any cut of ¥220 billion," Sasagawa said.

Under the new guidelines, when ministries get their budgetary request ceilings for fiscal 2010, possibly next month, they will no longer be bound by curbs on the annual increase in social security outlays.

The government will now aim to achieve a surplus in the primary balance at the national and local levels in 10 years, instead of by fiscal 2011 as stipulated by Koizumi in 2006.

The government will aim to at least halve the ratio of the primary balance deficit to GDP in less than five years. The guidelines also stipulate that the government should work to stabilize the ratio of national and local government debt to GDP midway into the next decade and start reducing it in the early 2020s.

"It's like saying farewell to Koizumi, Koizumi reforms," said Yasunari Ueno, chief market economist at Mizuho Securities Co. "The political situation ahead of the general election is strongly reflected" in the fiscal guidelines.

"The talks are going toward loosening fiscal discipline. Although this is positive for the present economic situation, it will be extremely negative if you look at the future."

The loose fiscal policy will probably lead to tax hikes and lower economic growth, and will drive corporations overseas, Ueno warned, saying the government is increasing spending while disregarding those future disadvantages.

Hiroshi Hanada, economist at Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co., doubted whether the new goal to achieve a primary budget surplus is realistic.

"The claim to achieve a (primary) surplus in 10 years will not be convincing unless cutting other expenditures is considered," while social security spending is maintained, he said.

Hanada also stressed his concern that the ballooning fiscal deficit may drive long-term interest rates higher and damage the economy.

"Since rising interest rates cause more companies to go bankrupt, there will be various negative effects both directly and indirectly," he said.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
High court OKs Sugaya retrial
Challenge to wrongful conviction not allowed
By SETSUKO KAMIYA
Staff writer

The Tokyo High Court said Tuesday a retrial will be held for Toshikazu Sugaya, who was released from prison earlier this month after new DNA evidence contradicted initial tests that led to his conviction in the 1990 murder of a 4-year-old girl in Tochigi Prefecture.

The date has yet to be set for the retrial to be held at the Utsunomiya District Court, which handed down a life sentence to the kindergarten bus driver in 1993.

But Sugaya, 62, will probably be acquitted by the end of this year.

Once the case opens, prosecutors are expected to seek Sugaya's acquittal, effectively clearing him of guilt.

But Sugaya and his lawyers expressed mixed emotions at a news conference in Tokyo. The retrial will surely clear Sugaya's name, but it will also mean the court will not hear evidence they believe can reveal why he was wrongfully convicted.

The counsel has repeatedly asked the high court for a session to question the experts who performed the new DNA tests before the retrial is decided, but the high court turned down all requests.

The lawyers criticized the court for not reviewing the decisions that led to the conviction of an apparently innocent man.

"The courts have wrongfully sentenced me to life in prison, and I'm not satisfied if they won't say anything about it," Sugaya said. "I really would like to receive an apology from all the judges, from the first case to this high court."

On June 17, the chief of the Tochigi Prefectural Police apologized to Sugaya face to face for the wrongful arrest, which he accepted. The Supreme Prosecutor's Office also expressed regrets for his indictment.

Sugaya, who spent 17 years in prison, was arrested on suspicion of murdering Mami Matsuda in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, based on DNA test results in December 1991.

He was released June 4 after new tests showed his DNA did not match traces found on the 4-year-old victim's clothes, contradicting the initial test results that led to his conviction.

He once confessed to kidnapping and killing the girl but later retracted his admission, saying he was forced to confess during the Tochigi police interrogation.

The Utsunomiya District Court in 1993 sentenced Sugaya to life, as sought by prosecutors. The Tokyo High Court dismissed his appeal in 1996 and the Supreme Court did likewise in 2000.

Sugaya's lawyers had been asking for a retrial, claiming the DNA test that led to his conviction had many errors, including contaminated samples.

Last December, the Tokyo High Court ordered a new DNA test be conducted on Sugaya.

On May 8, the court notified prosecutors and Sugaya's lawyers that the tests performed by two different experts both indicated he was most likely not the killer.

Prosecutors have already submitted to the Tokyo High Court their opinion acknowledging the fresh DNA test undermined the credibility of the earlier results that led to Sugaya's

"Events related to Sugaya murder conviction, release"
Kyodo News
May 13, 1990 — Mami Matsuda, 4, is found slain on the banks of the Watarase River in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, after vanishing from a pachinko parlor parking lot the previous day.

December 1991 — Toshikazu Sugaya is arrested on suspicion of murder based on DNA test results.

February 1992 — Sugaya pleads guilty at the start of his Utsunomiya District Court trial.

December 1992 — He reverses his plea during the trial, owns up to the charges again, then denies them again.

July 1993 — The court sentences Sugaya to life.

May 1996 — The Tokyo High Court dismisses his appeal.

October 1997 — Sugaya's counsel submits evidence to the Supreme Court claiming his DNA and that found on the victim may not match.

July 2000 — The Supreme Court recognizes the credibility of DNA test results used in the high court's decision, finalizing Sugaya's life sentence.

December 2002 — Sugaya petitions for a retrial at the Utsunomiya District Court, and his counsel presents an expert opinion on the DNA data.

February 2008 — The court dismisses the retrial plea. His counsel appeals the decision immediately.

December 2008 — The Tokyo High Court orders a new DNA test conducted on Sugaya.

May 8 — The high court tells prosecutors and the defense about the new DNA test, the results of which fail to prove a match.

June 4 — Sugaya is released from prison and prosecutors agree to a retrial.

June 10 — The Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office apologizes to Sugaya.

June 17 — The Tochigi Prefectural Police chief directly apologizes to him.

June 23 — The Tokyo High Court decides on retrial.

news20090624JP2

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Opposition group tries to delay organ law

(Kyodo News) A group of opposition lawmakers proposed Tuesday that the Upper House amend a bill to revise the Organ Transplant Law, seeking to delay the abolishment of the current minimum age of 15 for donors.

While the bill that cleared the Lower House last week would scrap the age limit of 15 or under for organ donors, the proposed amendment calls for maintaining the current age limit for a year to enable the creation of a new government panel to examine the matter.

Led by Keiko Chiba and Yuko Mori of the Democratic Party of Japan, the group of DPJ and Social Democratic Party members in the Upper House also aims to counter the provision in the original bill of recognizing people who are brain dead as legally dead.

The current Organ Transplant Law recognizes brain death only in cases involving people who have already declared their intention to donate organs and if their family members agree to it, and only allows people aged 15 or older to donate organs.

To increase the number of transplants in Japan, the bill is designed to allow people to donate organs regardless of their age provided they never stated their opposition while they were alive and family members give their consent.

The Upper House is expected to deliberate both the bill and the group's amendment in a plenary session this week.

According to the proposed amendment, an ad hoc research panel would be set up at the Cabinet Office to look into the criteria for determining children as brain dead and investigate ways to prevent harvesting organs from victims of child abuse.

The panel would be comprised of up to 15 members from academic and other sectors nominated by the prime minister and approved by both Diet chambers. It would be required to report its findings to the prime minister within a year of the revised law's enforcement.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Battle of Okinawa's end marked, 64 years on

NAHA, Okinawa Pref. (Kyodo) Okinawa on Tuesday marked the 64th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, which left more than 200,000 people dead in the closing days of World War II.

During a memorial ceremony at Peace Memorial Park in the city of Itoman, Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima urged the Japanese and U.S. governments to consolidate and reduce U.S. bases in Okinawa and lessen its burden in terms of the associated crimes and accidents.

Nakaima also said unexploded shells from the fighting 64 years ago are still a problem.

Prime Minister Taro Aso pledged to put forward "full efforts to alleviate the burden" on the prefecture and also promised to work on removing the unexploded bombs.

A construction worker was severely injured in January when a shell detonated in Itoman, site of some of the fiercest fighting.

"I have not forgotten that the peace and prosperity of Japan today has been built on the grave sacrifices of those who perished in the war," Aso said. "We must never repeat the horror of war."

This year, the names of 123 people were newly added to the list of those who perished, bringing the total to 240,856.

About 4,500 ceremony participants, including Lower House Speaker Yohei Kono and Upper House President Satsuki Eda, offered one minute of silent prayer at noon.

"Frankly speaking, I could not achieve much to alleviate Okinawa's burden, and I must apologize for that," said Kono, who worked on the U.S. base issue when he was the foreign minister. "I sincerely hope the new generation of politicians works on the issue seriously."


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
IWC seeks compromise to curb whale kill, finds skeptics

LISBON (AP) The International Whaling Commission began discussing Monday a possible compromise deal that would reduce the number of whales killed each year.

However, environmental groups expressed little hope of a breakthrough in the two-decade dispute at the IWC's weeklong annual meeting in Madeira, Portugal.

Japan, Iceland and Norway run whaling operations that kill around 2,000 whales a year and they are reluctant to give up the trade. Japan's hunt accounts for half the kill.

"I don't think this is the meeting of the breakthrough," Remi Parmentier of the U.S.-based Pew Whales Conservation Project said.

Greenpeace whaling campaigner Sara Holden fears the talks will fail to end the long-standing stalemate.

"My main concern is that the delegates here are simply going to sit on their hands, content to talk for another year whilst whales continue to die," she said.

Antiwhaling countries, including the United States, the European Union members and Australia, want to tighten the restrictions introduced by a 1986 moratorium. But a three-quarter majority vote is required for major changes to the IWC convention regulating whaling, and the IWC is split between whaling nations and their supporters and antiwhaling nations.
[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

The Japanese fleet hunts in Antarctica and the Northwestern Pacific under an IWC exemption for scientific research. Tokyo also argues that the international ban on commercial whaling violates its cultural traditions.

Critics say Japan's research whaling program is merely a cover for commercial whaling and that technological advances make it unnecessary to harpoon the whales. Militant environmentalists have clashed with Japan's whaling fleet in recent years.

While Japan has a scientific exemption, Iceland and Norway formally objected, declaring themselves exempt.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Female applicants break record in passing civil service exam

(Kyodo News) Women accounted for a record-high 20.1 percent of those who passed the Level-1 civil service examination for fiscal 2009, the first time the ratio has topped 20 percent since the current test was adopted in 1960, the National Personnel Authority said Tuesday.

The 300 women were among the 1,494 applicants who passed the government's top-tier exam, the authority said. The total number of successful applicants, however, fell 51 from fiscal 2008.

The new ratio for women broke the previous record of 19.2 percent set in fiscal 2008.

Women vying for administrative positions — in law, the economy and administration — hit an all-time high of 179, up five from the preceding year and making up a record 23.7 percent of the 755 applicants who qualified in the three areas.

A personnel authority official said the increase in successful female applicants is a result of its aggressive campaign to recruit women, which includes sponsoring seminars and giving explanatory briefings.

The Level-1 exam is considered a prerequisite for getting into "career" positions that can eventually lead to senior posts in the central government bureaucracy.

One in 14.9 applicants passed the most recent exam, compared with one in 13.7 the previous year, the personnel authority said.

The drop in the ratio means that competition is rising as more students apply for public-sector jobs while private-sector companies curb recruitment and downsize to deal with the recession.

People who passed the test will be interviewed by the ministries and agencies they want to work for. Only a third will be chosen to become career bureaucrats.

news20090624LAT

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[California]
State budget plans are built with fiscal gimmicks
Proposals from Democrats and Schwarzenegger would again push the pain into the future.
By Shane Goldmacher
June 24, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento -- A substantial number of the budget revisions that will go before the Legislature today promise no real savings or revenue and would ensure that California's fiscal woes stretch beyond the current crisis into coming years.

The Democrat-driven plan, which on paper reduces the state deficit by $23.2 billion, contains $7.2 billion in bookkeeping maneuvers, an analysis of the proposal shows. Moves to account for billions more are one-time fixes, are sure to be challenged in court or are grounded in rosy assumptions that the Legislature's own fiscal advisors say are unlikely to materialize.

A joint legislative committee adopted the proposals last week in lawmakers' latest attempts to balance the state's books. Both houses of the Legislature have scheduled votes on the package today.

Lawmakers could also vote this week on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's bid to close the deficit. His proposals include $4 billion in accounting gloss, plus $1.9 billion in borrowing, despite his declaration last week in Fresno that "the days of gimmicks and the days of denials are over -- California's day of reckoning is finally here."

One of the Democrats' ideas is to issue state employees' June 2010 paychecks at 12:01 a.m. on July 1 -- one minute into a new fiscal year -- instead of June 30. By producing 11 months' paychecks instead of 12, the state would spend $1.2 billion less next year but would have to repeat the ploy yearly.

Another short-term patch is a Schwarzenegger proposal, approved by the joint committee, to defer $1.7 billion in school funding until the next fiscal year. School districts would still have to run state-mandated programs in the coming year, but they wouldn't get paid until the next. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office likened that idea to racking up credit card debt.

Such gambits would ease California's immediate cash crunch even though they would do little to reconcile its long-term fiscal problems. Controller John Chiang has said the state won't be able to pay all of its bills as of July 28 unless a balanced budget is adopted.

Although neither the Democrats' package nor the governor's is expected to pass the Legislature intact, both contain so many accounting shifts that any final budget blueprint is likely to have some as well. Years of such schemes have deepened California's deficit, now projected at $24.3 billion -- more than a quarter of the general fund.

"We never actually fix it," state Sen. Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga) said of the perennial deficit.

GOP lawmakers have not offered a budget of their own.

Paper fixes

Deferrals and sleight of hand are well-trod ground in Sacramento because Democrats oppose deep budget cuts to balance the budget and Republicans resist new taxes.

"Do I think this is a good way to do business? No," said Sen. Denise Ducheny (D-San Diego), vice chairwoman of the joint committee. But it's necessary to save health and welfare programs, she said, and to help the state recover.

Government programs have already been pared back severely, with billions more in cuts on the docket. Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said the governor hoped "to avoid even deeper reductions" by proposing the deferral of schools money and other such maneuvers.

Schwarzenegger warned Democrats "not to add on to" his list of budgetary patches, but they did. "We just followed his lead," said Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento).

Schwarzenegger suggested, and Democrats approved, a $1.7-billion stopgap, which would be achieved by withholding 10% more in taxes from workers' paychecks beginning in January 2010. Workers would see larger state tax refunds the next year.

Democrats have proposed a 3% tax withholding on payments to independent contractors, who now pay their taxes quarterly or once a year. The shift would yield $2 billion in the fiscal year that begins July 1, and is the only device that lawmakers say may provide more money to the state over time, by increasing compliance with existing tax laws.

Shaky assumptions

Both proposed budgets rely on billions of dollars in revenue and savings that few experts believe will pan out.

Among them is the governor's proposed sale of the state-run workers' compensation insurance company to bring in $1 billion. The committee approved the move, but the legislative analyst has said such a complicated sale would be "very unlikely" to provide financial relief within a year.

Schwarzenegger's plan also includes $1 billion in Medi-Cal cuts that would require a federal waiver. But without the waiver in hand, "you shouldn't be counting the savings," complained Assemblyman Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber), a member of the joint committee.

Democrats, who oppose a waiver and thecuts that would come with it, vowed to get the $1-billion savings instead by securing money they say the federal government owes California. It is unclear whether Washington would pay.

And in the state prison system, Schwarzenegger banks on saving $182 million by commuting the sentences of 8,500 of the 19,000 illegal immigrant felons and turning them over to federal authorities for deportation.

But prison and finance officials say the governor can unilaterally commute only the sentences of those convicted of a single felony -- about 3,000 inmates. Under state law, commutation for the rest would require permission from four justices of the California Supreme Court.

Lawmakers agreed to the plan but said they might change some details. The legislative analyst's office said the state should count on saving only $50 million this way, less than a third of what Schwarzenegger and lawmakers want.

Legal challenges

Other proposals are likely to be tied up in court.

Schwarzenegger wants -- and the Democrats have accepted -- a $1-billion raid on local gasoline taxes earmarked for transportation projects. Municipal governments have reacted with howls of protest, and the governing board of the League of California Cities voted unanimously Monday to move forward with a lawsuit.

The group's executive director, Chris McKenzie, said lawmakers and the governor are "holding their breath" in hope that such a move is constitutional.

In April, local redevelopment agencies won a lawsuit against the state over its $350- million raid on their coffers last year. But Democrats have put another attempt to siphon the funds into their latest budget plan, rewriting it in a bid to appease the courts.

The redevelopment agencies have vowed to sue again.

news20090624NYT1

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Middle East]
Obama Condemns Iran’s Iron Fist Against Protests
By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama hardened his tone toward Iran on Tuesday, condemning the government for its crackdown against election protesters and accusing Iran’s leaders of fabricating charges against the United States.

In his strongest comments since the crisis erupted 10 days ago, Mr. Obama used unambiguous language to assail the Iranian government during a news conference at the White House, calling himself “appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the past few days.”

He praised what he called the courage and dignity of the demonstrators, especially the women who have been marching, and said that he had watched the “heartbreaking” video of a 26-year-old Iranian woman whose last seconds of life were captured by video camera after she was shot on a Tehran street.

“While this loss is raw and extraordinarily painful,” he said, “we also know this: Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

Yet beyond muscular words, Mr. Obama has limited tools for bringing pressure to bear on the Iranian government, which for years has been brushing off international calls for it to curb its nuclear program.

After the news conference, administration officials said there was little they could do to influence the outcome of the confrontation between the government and the protesters. And more so now than even a few days ago, they said, the prospects for any dialogue with Iran over its nuclear program appear all but dead for the immediate future, though they held out hope that Iran, assuming it has a stable government, could respond to Mr. Obama’s overtures later in the year.

At home, Mr. Obama has been under intense pressure, especially from conservatives, to align the United States more forcefully with the protesters. On Tuesday, he dismissed suggestions that he had changed his tone toward Iran in response to critical comments from Senator John McCain of Arizona and other Republicans.

In sometimes testy exchanges with reporters at the news conference, Mr. Obama defended himself, contending that even the moderate tone he had struck previously had been twisted by Iran’s government to suggest that the protests had been engineered by the United States.

“They’ve got some of the comments that I’ve made being mistranslated in Iran, suggesting that I’m telling rioters to go out and riot some more,” Mr. Obama said, referring to accounts that the White House said surfaced late last week and over the weekend. “There are reports suggesting that the C.I.A. is behind all this. All of which is patently false. But it gives you a sense of the narrative that the Iranian government would love to play into.”

But after the crackdown over the weekend that left an untold number of protesters dead — and after the wide dissemination of the video of the last moments of Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian woman who appeared to lock eyes with the camera as she died after being shot — White House officials decided that Mr. Obama had to take a tougher stand.

“The situation looked very different on Saturday than it did when he first spoke in the Oval Office a week ago,” one of Mr. Obama’s media advisers said.

“It was the bloodshed” that led to the change in tone, he said.

While Mr. Obama did not rule out the possibility of engaging with Iran over the nuclear issue, administration officials and European diplomats say that the door to talks has all but closed, at least for now.

“I think that under these circumstances, no one is going to be able to pursue anything because there is nothing to pursue,” said Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, who has been consulting with White House officials “on a daily basis,” he said, about the unfolding situation in Iran.

Mr. Parsi said that all past assumptions about where Iran was headed had been cast aside by the disputed election results and the response of the protesters.

Administration officials acknowledged that after reading reams of intelligence reports, watching videos of the street demonstrations and absorbing the trickle of intelligence from Iran, they were unable to predict how the protests might turn out.

During the news conference, Mr. Obama maintained that he had been consistent in his tone toward Iran all along. “As soon as violence broke out — in fact, in anticipation of potential violence — we were very clear in saying that violence was unacceptable, that that was not how governments operate with respect to their people,” Mr. Obama said.

But the language Mr. Obama used on Tuesday was more forceful and less ambiguous than his previous statements. In an interview with CNBC and The New York Times last week, he said that as far as America’s national interests were concerned, there was not much difference between Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

In his first public comment on the situation on June 15, Mr. Obama said he was troubled by the postelection violence and called on Iran’s leaders to respect free speech and the democratic process. The next day, on June 16, he said he had “deep concerns” about the elections but also said that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling.”

In the internal discussions at the White House about how to handle Iran, Mr. Obama’s aides are clearly struggling with how to reconcile two different goals: supporting a nascent, unpredicted movement in the streets that could weaken the country’s top clerics, and following the diplomatic mixture of pressure and diplomacy that Mr. Obama settled on months ago as a strategy to halt Iran’s nuclear work.

The protests, administration officials said, create the first possibility in 30 years that the mullahs’ grip on Iran might be loosened. Even if the street protests are put down, one official said, “a fissure has opened up that cannot be completely closed.”

Clearly those events took the administration by surprise: none of the possibilities for the election that were laid out for Mr. Obama a month ago, one official said, included the possibility of a violently disputed election.

Yet in the long run, Mr. Obama’s aides say, they are not certain that the protests will change the fundamental calculus about the risks Iran poses to its neighbors or the United States. One of Mr. Obama’s strategists noted that “one has to be concerned that while all this is happening the centrifuges are still spinning,” a reference to the machines used to enrich uranium.

news20060624NYT2

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Middle East]
Khamenei Vows Iran Will Not Yield ‘at Any Cost’
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
Published: June 24, 2009

TEHRAN — Ruling out political compromise after a harsh crackdown on the streets, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted Wednesday the authorities would not yield to pressure from opponents demanding a new election following allegations of electoral fraud.

“I had insisted and will insist on implementing the law on the election issue,” Ayatollah Khamenei told legislators, according to news reports. “Neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost.”

His remarks came after a losing candidate in Iran’s disputed presidential election formally withdrew complaints of vote rigging Wednesday, opening a rift among those who had challenged the outcome of the June 12 vote.

Other opponents maintained their defiance, calling for continued protests and the release of detainees. But the Ayatollah’s comments strengthened the impression that, with street demonstrations apparently easing in the face of the crackdown, the authorities had resolved to use all levers of power to choke off protest, including political pressure on candidates.

Mohsen Rezai, a former hard-line commander of the Revolutionary Guards, had been of three candidates complaining of irregularities, saying he had evidence of 900,000 votes cast for him, while the official count was 680,000, less than two percent of the turnout in the official tally of 40 million.

But on Wednesday he said was withdrawing the complaints.

In a letter to the Guardian Council, the leading electoral oversight body, Mr. Rezai said the current “political, social and security situation has entered a sensitive and decisive phase, which is more important than the election,” Press TV, state television’s English-language satellite broadcaster, said. The letter was sent to the secretary of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the broadcaster said on its Web site.

Despite efforts to silence dissent and despite an appearance of disarray in opposition ranks, the wife of former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main opposition candidate, issued a call Wednesday for the immediate release of Iranians detained in election protests, his Web site reported.

“I regret the arrest of many politicians and people and want their immediate release,” Zahra Rahnavard, who has been playing an influential role in the protests, declared. “It is my duty to continue legal protests to preserve Iranian rights.”

Trailing Mr. Moussavi and the former Parliament speaker, Mehdi Karroubi, Mr. Rezai was the most conservative of the losing candidates and had been under strong pressure from Iran’s rulers to pull back from the confrontation.

Mr. Rezai was quoted as calling the ballot a “clear sample of religious democracy,” sharing language with a powerful defense of the ballot in a sermon last Friday by Ayatollah Khamenei.

Mr. Rezai’s decision to withdraw, regional analysts said, represented an incremental but significant step back for the opposition, since his status as being part of and loyal to the system adding credibility to the overall electoral challenge.

He attended the Friday prayer session addressed by Ayatollah Khamenei last week and was the only one of the election challengers to meet the following day with the Guardian Council, the powerful 12-member body of clerics charged with vetting and certifying elections.

Late on Tuesday, Ayatollah Khamenei agreed to a request by the council for five more days to investigate over 600 complaints it says opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad have lodged.

The move appeared largely symbolic since the Guardian Council has already announced it will had ruled out annulling the election. For its part, the government has taken the provocative step of announcing its intention to have Mr. Ahmadinejad sworn in as president by mid-August, despite the most sustained challenge to the government since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

According to Press TV, Mr. Rezai said he was withdrawing because of a shortage of time to investigate irregularities.

While his share of the opposition vote was small — particularly in comparison to the 34 percent the official count gave to Mr. Moussavi and the 63 percent claimed by Mr. Ahmadinejad — his decision represented a further move toward a formal victory declaration for the president.

Iran’s government has been moving aggressively on to crush popular protests , setting up a special court for demonstrators, detaining hundreds of independent and opposition journalists and activists, and sending a force of police officers and militiamen onto the streets.

The crackdown left the center of Tehran eerily quiet on Tuesday after the huge demonstrations and clashes of recent days. It seemed perhaps a moment of pause for protesters to regroup or reconsider, after at least 17 demonstrators had been killed. Arrests and intimidation left the opposition with no visible leadership, even amid mostly anonymous calls on the Internet for more demonstrations and even a general strike in coming days.

On Wednesday, people on some of Tehran’s streets circulated a five-page flier calling on opponents of the election to demonstrate at 4 p.m. local time outside the Parliament building in the capital with their families and to gather on Thursday at the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic revolution.

Opponents have already declared Thursday a day of mourning for the dead, including Neda Agha-Soltan a 26-year-old woman whose death on the streets and depicted in amateur video clips has become an emblem of protest.

The origin of the flier was not clear and it was not known how widely it was being distributed. The flier was issued jointly in the names of Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi and it said Mr. Moussavi would make a public appearance.

There were, however, growing signs of divisions, too, within the alliance united behind Mr. Ahmadinejad. Members of Parliament upset with the brutality of the government crackdown summoned the interior, justice and intelligence ministers to a hearing.

“I don’t think anyone really knows what comes next,” said an Iranian political analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the government. “Most likely, we are going to enter a period of relative uncertainly, with ebbs and flows, until the Islamic Republic of Iran is altered or finds a new avenue for legitimacy.”

The question hanging over the opposition, a diverse collection of reformers, conservatives, clerics, students and members of the middle class and working class, was what, if anything, would take the extraordinary events of the last week forward.

The government continued to keep the opposition off balance, in part by detaining many people, including some with records of independence from the state but with no connection with the protests. At least 55 leading journalists, intellectuals and former government officials have been detained because of their association with Mr. Moussavi.

The electoral controversy continued to boil, spilling over Iran’s own borders, as President Obama issued on Tuesday his harshest condemnation of events there yet, saying he was “appalled and outraged” by the attacks on civilian protesters.

“I strongly condemn these unjust actions,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference at the White House.

Iran’s leadership pressed its own charges that foreign powers had meddled in its internal affairs and instigated the widespread protests. State television showed people identified as protesters saying they had been influenced by foreign news media, Reuters reported.

“I think we were provoked by networks like the BBC and the Voice of America to take such immoral actions,” one young man said.

Britain announced it had expelled two Iranian diplomats in a tit-for-tat response to Iran’s decision a day earlier to expel two British diplomats. Iran also lashed out at the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, for his call to end “arrests, threats and use of force.”

Iran’s foreign minister said on Wednesday Tehran was reviewing whether to downgrade ties with Britain, which Iran has accused of interference in its disputed presidential election, the ISNA news agency said in a report quoted by Reuters.

“We are reviewing this issue,” Manouchehr Mottaki said, according to ISNA. He was also quoted by as saying Iran would not participate in a meeting of the G-8 countries this week in Italy to discuss Afghanistan with regional powers. The G-8 brings together industrialized nations including the United States and Britain along with other western countries, Japan and Russia.

Distancing itself from western nations on the issue, Moscow said Tuesday it recognized the outcome of the Iranian vote.

By contrast, Iran’s foreign minister said on Wednesday Tehran was reviewing whether to downgrade ties with Britain, which Iran has accused of interference in its disputed presidential election, the ISNA news agency reported.

news20090624WP

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Transportation]
Train Operator Apparently Hit Brakes Before Crash
Investigators Probe Site for Cause of Crash
By Lena H. Sun and Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 24, 2009; 8:12 AM

The operator of the Metro train that slammed into a stationary train in front of it apparently had activated the emergency brakes in a failed effort to stop before the accident, federal officials said yesterday as they searched for the cause of Monday's Red Line wreck that killed nine and injured 80.

Debbie Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board said the emergency brake button, known as the "mushroom," was depressed, and the steel rails showed evidence that the brakes were engaged. Investigators also said the striking train was in automatic mode, which means onboard computers should have controlled its speed and stopped it before it got too close to the stationary train.

In addition, Metro sources said, the first two cars of that train were two months overdue for scheduled maintenance of some braking components.

Taken together, experts say these facts point to several possible scenarios: The operator activated the brakes too late; the computers that are supposed to stop a train from getting too close to another train faltered; the train's brakes failed; or some combination of those. Some passengers on the striking train have said that they never felt the train slow down.

The NTSB investigation will continue today, though a spokeswoman said early this morning that a plan to simulate the conditions surrounding the crash -- using the same types of rail cars -- had been postponed and would not be conducted at least until tomorrow.

Some of the Metrorail stations that were closed yesterday because of the collision have been reopened, and MARC service has resumed. But officials say Red Line commuters should still expect significant delays.

The NTSB spokeswoman said a news briefing will likely be held this afternoon.

Yesterday, investigators painstakingly searched through the tangled heap of metal on the tracks just north of the Fort Totten Station in Northeast Washington. They were examining everything: the condition of the trains, track and signals; the actions of the operator and her downtown supervisors; and the computers that control train movement and are supposed to automatically prevent crashes. Investigators will also look at maintenance work performed this month on the computerized train control system along the stretch of track where the crash took place.

Officials began to remove the cars from the trains yesterday and plan to try to experiment with similar trains to determine approximate speed and stopping distance, Hersman said.

The crash, the force of which vaulted the striking train atop the one it rammed, occurred on a curve where the speed limit is 59 mph, Hersman said. The experiment will also try to determine whether the curve, or anything else, obstructed the train operator's view of the stopped train. The operator, Jeanice McMillan, 42, was among those who died in the accident. Investigators will examine her cellphone and text-messaging records, review her work and rest schedule, and analyze blood samples, all standard NTSB procedures.

Investigators are also delving into the automatic train protection system, which is designed to make collisions impossible. Had the system been working correctly, it would have sensed that Train 112 was getting too close to Train 214 and directed the brakes aboard Train 112 to engage.

"I truly believe Metro is a safe system," Metro General Manager John B. Catoe Jr. said. Catoe said it was too early in the investigation to know what caused the crash, but he said there was "no evidence" that the operator was using a cellphone or texting at the time of the crash. After a special board meeting yesterday, he told reporters, "There's not a letter of evidence" to indicate operator error. And right now, he said, there is also no indication of signal failure.

The six cars that made up Train 112 were put together in an unusual way. Metro trains operate in married pairs of cars, and the lead car is almost always an "A" car, which some operators say run more smoothly and communicate better with the electronic devices buried along the track. But in the case of Train 112, the lead car was a "B" car, Metro officials said. It was unclear last night why the train was configured that way. It was also unclear what effect, if any, the configuration could have had on the crash.

The cars were among the oldest in Metro's fleet, purchased between 1974 and 1978 from Rohr Industries for the opening of the subway system. They have been rehabilitated and retrofitted "to keep them in good condition," said Metro board Chairman Jim Graham of the District.

But federal investigators consider the cars to be unsafe because of a tendency during a crash to collapse into one another like a telescope, reducing the "survivability" space, or the area in a car in which passengers can escape harm.

The force of the impact sheared the lead car of Train 112, pushing part of it onto the roof of the trailing car of Train 214 and slamming the rest into the body of Train 214. Two-thirds of Train 112's lead car was crushed, Hersman said.

After a Rohr train telescoped during a 2004 crash at the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan Station, the NTSB recommended that Metro retire the Rohrs or strengthen their frames to prevent collapse. But the transit agency declined, saying that the cars make up one-third of the fleet and that Metro could not afford to mothball them ahead of their planned retirement in 2014, and that retrofitting would be costly and impractical. The NTSB, which makes safety recommendations but has no enforcement authority, disagreed with Metro's stance, calling it "unacceptable" at the time.

Yesterday, Hersman again questioned the safety of the Rohr cars and blamed Metro for failing to act. "We recommended to [Metro] to either retrofit those cars or phase them out of service," she said. "Those concerns were not addressed."

Metro uses 290 1000 series cars, which make up more than 25 percent of its 1,126-car fleet.

Graham said replacing the cars would cost almost $1 billion, money that Metro does not have. Metro is the only major transit system in the country without a source of dedicated funds. The agency appeals every year to the District, Virginia and Maryland for funding, a situation that makes long-term planning difficult.

The NTSB also recommended that Metro install data recorders, similar to the black boxes found in airplanes, in all of its cars after the 2004 crash. Although the agency installed recorders in some of its newest cars, the Rohr cars did not have them -- a condition that Hersman also called unacceptable.

Metro officials also did not install critical software revisions that would have allowed investigators to determine whether the operator had applied the emergency brakes and the train's speed during braking, according to a source knowledgeable about the braking systems. Investigators might be able to determine whether the emergency brakes were deployed based on physical evidence.

Metro's automated system is built around electronic relays on the trains and buried along the track that allow onboard computers to control speeds and stop trains from getting too close to one another. Over the past decade, Metro has struggled with troublesome relays. The agency tore out all 20,000 trackside relays in 1999 after discovering that a small portion designed to last 70 years were failing after 25.

The manufacturer, Alstom Signaling, agreed to replace the relays at a cost to Metro of about $8 million. None of the new relays have failed, one Metro official said.

The NTSB and the Federal Transit Administration have criticized Metro for failing to act aggressively to address safety problems, especially at the time of a 1996 crash at Shady Grove that killed a train operator

news20090624GDN1

[Environment] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment]
Obama urges Congress to move swiftly on climate change bill
US president uses news conference to address concerns about costs of moving to clean energy
Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 18.54 BST
Article history

Barack Obama put his presidential prestige on the line to urge Congress to pass climate change legislation today, using the high visibility of a White House press conference to take on widespread concerns about the costs of moving to cleaner sources of energy.

The intervention from Obama comes on the eve of a high stakes vote in Congress on a climate change bill. Democrats in Congress have called on Obama to make a personal appeal for the bill which is on a high stakes course this week.

The Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has taken a gamble on moving up the date for a vote on the bill to Friday - despite near total resistance to the reform package from Republicans and strong opposition from farm state Democrats.

The presidential intervention crowns a carefully coordinated effort by the White House, administration officials, environmental organisations and major corporations to build support for a bill that is at the heart of Obama's agenda.

In the press conference, Obama rejected the argument that getting America off oil and coal would put additional pressure on the federal deficit. He also directly took on critics who say the sweeping climate change bill would inflict high costs on ordinary American families.

"At a time of great fiscal challenges, this legislation is paid for by the polluters who currently emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air we breathe," he said.

He repeated what has become the mantra of his administration that investment in clean energy would help save or create millions of new green jobs. "These incentives will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy," he said.

The personal appeal from Obama caps a weeklong PR offensive - joined later tonight by Al Gore who had a conference call scheduled with tens of thousands of his supporters.

Administration officials have fanned out across the country to promote the bill. Today alone Vice-president Joe Biden was in Ohio talking up the potential of green manufacturing jobs, the US interior secretary, Ken Salazar, was in New Jersey awarding new offshore wind farm licences, and the energy secretary, Steven Chu, announcing $8bn in loan guarantees for carmakers to promote the development of electric vehicles.

More than 20 leading corporations, including energy companies like Duke Energy, Exelon and NRG as well as firms like Starbucks, eBay, and Nike took out full-page ads today in a number of newspapers on Capitol Hill in support of the bill. "We support this legislation because certainty and clear rules of the road enable us to plan," the ad began.

Environmental organisations have also joined the effort, circulating a cost-analysis report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office which said the bill would cost the average household about $175 by 2020 - or 48 cents a day. That is a fraction of the cost to the average family that Republican opponents of the bill had claimed.

Youth activists, meanwhile, organised a flash mob in a House office building today.

But Democrats in Congress had still been pressing for a direct sign from Obama. Yesterday, GK Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat who sits on the House energy committee, acknowledged that the bill was foundering and said Obama would need to make a personal appeal to ensure the bill's passage.

"I think the time is right now for the president of the United States to really weigh in on the energy conversation. He needs to use his communications skills as he does so well," he told a seminar on energy. "If he can use his bully pulpit like this I think the American people are going to get it."

The bill, now swollen to 1,200 pages by various amendments, would cut America's greenhouse gas emissions by 17% over 2005 levels by 2020. It is seen as crucial to the prospects of getting a global agreement to act against climate change at Copenhagen later this year.

The bill has been criticised by Greenpeace and others for failing to move aggressively enough to cap emissions to prevent some of the extreme effects of climate change occurring late in the century.

It has also run into strong opposition from Democrats from rural and farming states, and it was far from certain today that the party leadership can muster enough votes to get the package through the House. Republicans almost uniformly oppose the climate change bill, and have put forward an alternative plan calling for 100 new nuclear plants.

However, Democrats are under pressure to move ahead on the energy bill and turn their attention towards the other item on Obama's agenda: healthcare.

Pelosi decided last night to press ahead for a vote - despite the lack of a formal deal with the bill's most vocal opponent, Collin Peterson, the Democratic chairman of the House agricultural committee. Peterson has been leading the campaign from farm state Democrats for better terms for the ethanol industry in the bill - a role acknowledged by Obama today who addressed him personally in his opening remarks.

The gesture was part of a broader effort by the White House and administration officials to corral congressional Democrats for a vote. The White House sent Lisa Jackson, the chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Tom Vilsack, the US agricultural secretary, to meet Peterson on Friday, but an aide to the congressman said no deal was reached.

However, Pelosi said she would keep to the schedule. "There are some issues still under discussion, but we are confident we can resolve them by the time the bill goes to the floor on Friday," a spokesman told reporters.

news20090624GDN2

[Environment] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Copenhagen Climate Change Summit 2009]
Todd Stern rejects calls for 40% cut in US emissions
Barack Obama's climate envoy dismisses calls at major economies summit for US and other rich nations to cut emissions by 40% by 2020
Jo Tuckman in Jiutepec, Mexico
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 June 2009 11.41 BST
Article history

President Barack Obama's climate envoy has rejected calls for the US and other rich nations to make radical greenhouse gas cuts over the next decade.

Speaking at the end of a ministerial level meeting of the world's most polluting countries in Mexico yesterday, Todd Stern dismissed the idea that the US might comply with calls for industrialised nations to cut carbon emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.

"In our judgment [this kind of cut is] not necessary and not feasible given where we are starting from," he said. "So it is not on the cards."

Stern had earlier showered praise on the flagship US climate change bill expected to be debated by Congress this week calling it "an enormously ambitious proposal for the United States." The bill calls for a 17% reduction in US emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 and an 80% reduction by 2050.

The demands of developing countries and campaigners for a 40% minimum emissions cut by rich countries has been a constant theme in the run up to the crucial December summit in Copenhagen which is supposed to produce an agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol that runs out in 2012. Scientists have also recommended that averting catastrophic global warming requires industrialised countries to cut carbon emissions by 25% to 40%.

"It is disappointing that the Obama administration is not supporting rigorous scientific standards for battling climate change," said Daniel Kessler of Greenpeace. "The administration now has just a few months before Copenhagen to rectify its position and lead the world to a fair, equitable and adequate climate agreement."

This week's meeting of the Major Economies Forum of Energy and Climate in Jiutepec in central Mexico brought together 19 countries that collectively account for over 80% of both global wealth and global emissions. The US and China alone make up about 50% of emissions in roughly equal proportions.

It was the third and final preparatory gathering ahead of the summit in L'Aquila in Italy in July where the leaders of the G8 plus 5 hope to finalise a common proposal to take to Copenhagen.

With most new scientific studies indicating that the planet is speeding ever faster towards disaster, the pressure to produce a strong global accord in Copenhagen is huge. And with the reversal of position in the post-Bush White House, the possibility of reaching some kind of consensus looked better than ever.

But if the activists outside the Mexico meeting felt let down this week, the few delegates willing to talk were cautiously optimistic.

"The fact that the US now has a clear willingness to work towards an agreement is helpful," Mexico's environment minister, Rafael Elvira Quesada, said. "But you cannot reach an accord at the stroke of a pen."

The disagreement over emissions cuts is only one of the complex issues involved. There are also serious divergences over how to help the developing world both finance the conversion to green technologies, enabling clean economic growth, and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

Mexico's Green Fund idea is one of the two main financing proposals currently on the table, and was described as "very interesting" by the US envoy.

The Green Fund would require all but the poorest countries to contribute money based on individual criteria such as per capita GDP and emissions. All countries would have a say how the cash that would be distributed, driven by how many tons of greenhouse gases a particular project saves.

The other main proposal comes from Norway and would require developed nations to put 2% of the carbon pollution credits they currently receive under Kyoto up for auction. The money raised would finance climate change projects in the developing world.


[Mining]
Hansen and Hannah arrested in West Virginia mining protest
Protesters arrested for blocking a road near Massey Energy coal processing plant in Raleigh County, southern West Virginia
Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 June 2009 09.39 BST
Article history

Actor Daryl Hannah and Nasa climate scientist James Hansen were among 31 people arrested yesterday as they protested against mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia.

State police sergeant Michael Baylous said all were released after being cited for impeding traffic and obstructing an officer after they blocked a road near a Massey Energy subsidiary's coal processing plant.

Another woman, who was among a crowd of mining industry supporters, was charged with misdemeanour battery, Baylous said.

The arrests followed a rally involving several hundred protesters outside an elementary school about 90m away from the plant's coal storage silo. After the rally, protesters marched quietly to the plant and attempted to enter the property, but were blocked by several hundred coal miners shouting, "Go home."

The protesters, who also included former congressman Ken Hechler, sat on the road before surrendering.

Mountaintop mining involves blasting away ridgetops to expose coal seams. While mine operators typically are required to return the mountain to its approximate original shape, excess material is used to fill valleys, burying streams.

"It's not necessary," Hannah said before she was arrested. "If you do it wisely, there are ways to use renewables. It's realistic for everybody."

Hansen, director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, criticised President Barack Obama's administration for not banning the practice, although the administration does plan to tighten regulations.

Miners such as Fred Griggs, who works at a Massey surface operation, arrived in droves to apply pressure of their own.

"Defending my job," he said, leaning on a pro-mining placard. "I've got to support my family."

Massey vice-president of surface operations Mike Snelling said the company did not bring miners to protest.

Richmond, Virginia-based Massey is the nation's fourth-largest coal producer by revenue. It operates mines in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky.

news20090624ASC

[Environment] from [scientificamerican.com]

[Altarnative Energy Technology]
June 23, 2009
Offshore Wind Power Catches Some Air
New Jersey, Delaware to build first test towers
By Ben Geman

The Interior Department today issued first-time "exploratory" leases for wind projects off New Jersey and Delaware, allowing developers to locate data-gathering towers aimed at supporting planned commercial wind farms.

Interior announced four leases for areas ranging from 6 to 18 miles offshore to Bluewater Wind New Jersey Energy LLC; Fishermen's Energy of New Jersey LLC; Deepwater Wind LLC; and Bluewater Wind Delaware LLC.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, proclaiming a "major first step" toward harnessing offshore wind power, announced the leases today in Atlantic City, alongside New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D).

Salazar is one of several Obama administration officials dispatched to highlight President Obama's energy agenda, which Obama himself is expected to address in an early-afternoon news conference.

The administration events include Energy Secretary Steven Chu announcing $8 billion in loans to help the auto industry make advanced, efficient vehicles (see related story). Democrats are also seeking to build support for a sweeping energy and climate bill expected on the House floor later this week.

The wind announcement is one of several recent federal steps on offshore renewable energy. They include resolution of a dispute between Interior's Minerals Management Service and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over the agencies' roles in regulating development of various offshore renewable energies.

In April, MMS completed final rules on commercial offshore renewable-energy leasing -- policies that must be in place for the developers with the newly issued exploratory leases to construct wind farms in the federal waters.

The exploratory leases are being issued under a Bush-era policy aimed at allowing preliminary work on offshore alternative energy projects while commercial leasing rules were crafted.

"That is a critical first step for any wind project, to be able to measure the wind resource, and I think the efforts to get the rule out and to do the MOU [memorandum of understanding] between FERC and MMS really did lay the ground work for this action," said Laurie Jodziewicz, manager of siting policy for the American Wind Energy Association.

The meteorological towers would collect data on wind speed, intensity and direction. Salazar said that if the projects come to commercial fruition, they would jointly provide 1,500 megawatts of power.

Bluewater Wind -- which is receiving leases off New Jersey and Delaware -- said it plans to begin survey work this summer, build the meteorological towers this winter and begin their ocean operation in the spring of 2010.

Salazar has touted the potential for wind energy along the Atlantic Coast to eventually supply large amounts of electric power (E&ENews PM, April 2).

news20090624NTC1

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 22 June 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/4591040a
News
Climate burden of refrigerants rockets
Environmentalists push for tougher regulation of chemicals meant to help the ozone layer.
Jeff Tollefson

Modern refrigerants designed to protect the ozone layer are poised to become a major contributor to global warming because of their future explosive growth in the developing world, scientists report this week.

Hydrofluorocarbon chemicals (HFCs) were developed to phase out ozone-depleting gases, in response to the Montreal Protocol. But they can be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gases in trapping heat. HFCs are deployed in refrigerators and air-conditioning units, and their use is poised to grow in the coming decades.

In the new study, a team led by Guus Velders at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven analysed the latest industry trends and then modelled HFC production to 2050. Their results suggest that HFC emissions could be the equivalent of between 5.5 billion and 8.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2010 — roughly 19% of the projected CO2 emissions if greenhouse gases continue to rise unchecked (G. J. M. Velders et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073.pnas.0902817106; 2009).

The new numbers will fuel the efforts of environmentalists and others who have been pushing for aggressive new HFC regulations. Manufacturers could shift towards using HFCs with the lowest climate impact during the transition to a new generation of refrigerants — still under development — that affect neither the ozone layer nor the climate.

"Now is the moment to make a decision to steer this in a direction that you want," Velders says. "The developing world is already in the transition to HFCs."

Although it makes no policy recommendations, the study could play into an ongoing political debate on regulating the chemicals. HFCs currently fall under the umbrella of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, but advocates say the fastest and cheapest way to handle them is under the ozone treaty. Montreal delegates plan to discuss the issue when they meet in Geneva next month.

Durwood Zaelke, who heads the advocacy group Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington DC, says the Velders study confirms the potential benefits of regulating HFCs under the Montreal agreement. It will, he says, help build momentum as the delegates move towards a decision in November.

The Montreal treaty, which came into force in 1989, has implementation experts in virtually every country and has already succeeded in reducing 96 chemicals by 97% each, Zaelke says. "It's a winning record, and we need to give the treaty this shot."

In 2007, Velders' team looked at the effect of the Montreal Protocol and found that its incidental greenhouse-gas reductions — equivalent to 11 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually by 2010 — are five to six times greater than those of the Kyoto Protocol. Montreal participants had already agreed to phase out chlorofluorocarbons by 2010 and hydrochlorofluorocarbons by 2040, but the Velders study helped convince them to accelerate phasing out the latter by a decade in order to capture the climate benefits.

The latest study carries that work forward and suggests that the problem posed by HFCs could be several times larger than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 assessment. Using the IPCC's baseline economic scenarios, the work assumes that refrigerant technologies will be deployed at levels roughly equal to those in the developed world today. By mid-century, emissions in currently developing countries would rise to levels eight times higher than those in developed nations.

Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, a coordinating lead author of the IPCC chapter covering HFCs who was not involved in the study, called the paper "a very good piece of work".

"It elevates the importance of HFCs in terms of climate forcing to a level higher than we may have thought initially," says Ramaswamy, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.

Still, he says, it "doesn't significantly detract from the attention that CO₂ and methane should be getting."


[naturenews]
Published online 22 June 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.588
News
Heart study questions diabetes drugs
A molecular pathway could explain how a class of drugs leads to heart failure.
Charlotte Schubert

Researchers who study how tumours balloon in size have discovered one way that enlargement of the heart can lead to heart failure. The work, although mostly done in mice, could help explain why a class of diabetes drugs called thiazolidinediones (TZDs) increase the risk of heart failure.

These drugs have been controversial since a 2007 analysis¹ of Avandia (rosiglitazone), a TZD made by GlaxoSmithKline, suggested that patients taking it are at increased risk of heart attack. Less controversial are data linking TZDs with heart failure, a distinct condition in which the heart cannot pump enough blood through the body.

"We already knew if you had heart failure you probably should not be taking these drugs, but this paper provides an additional explanation why," says Clay Semenkovich, an endocrinologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri.

The work suggests that a molecule activated by TZDs, called PPAR-γ, underlies one aspect of heart failure.

Serendipity
When Wilhelm Krek, a cancer biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and his colleagues began the study, they were not thinking about diabetes drugs. They wanted to know what happens when tissues enlarge.

"If a cancer grows, it outstrips its nutrient and oxygen supply," says Krek. Something similar may happen when the heart enlarges, as it often does after a heart attack or during chronic high blood pressure. The increased size enables the heart initially to pump more blood but can ultimately weaken the organ.

Enlarged hearts labour to get oxygen, and they switch from burning fat to glucose, which can provide energy without oxygen but is less efficient. Heart cells can then weaken, accumulate fat and eventually commit suicide. Krek and his colleagues found that PPAR-γ may usher in this downfall.

The researchers found high levels of PPAR-γ in heart tissue from people with heart failure, as well as in hearts of mice experimentally manipulated to model the condition. When they knocked PPAR-γ out in mouse heart cells, the cells did not accumulate fat and did not die.

In the failing heart, PPAR-γ works together with a protein found in many tumours that coordinates the body's response to low oxygen. The study is published in the June issue of Cell Metabolism.²

New treatments
The findings open the door to new ways of counteracting heart failure, which afflicts between 1% and 2% of adults in developed countries. But they also raise the possibility that activation of PPAR-γ by TZDs could bump up fat accumulation and cell suicide in the heart.

David Moller — a researcher at Eli Lilly, the Indianapolis, Indiana-based maker of the TZD Actos (pioglitazone) — points out that the drugs may also promote heart failure by causing the accumulation of fluids in the body, forcing the heart to work harder. The new study, he says, "provides one additional hypothesis".

The clinical effect of TZDs on heart failure is more clear-cut. In the 20 June issue of The Lancet, researchers funded by GlaxoSmithKline published a study³ examining whether Avandia raised the risk of cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attack compared with conventional diabetes drugs. The study shows that Avandia doubles the risk of heart failure, in sync with previous findings on TZDs.

Avandia's role in heart attacks is far more in dispute. The Lancet paper is the full publication of a trial involving 4,447 people and confirms an earlier, interim analysis that Avandia does not increase deaths from cardiovascular events.

But in an editorial accompanying the study, endocrinologists Ravi Retnakaran and Bernard Zinman of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, in Canada, said: "Definitive conclusions about the relation between [Avandia] and cardiovascular disease remain elusive." For instance, people in the study who took Avandia also had increased use of statins, drugs that may have reduced cardiovascular events. And people taking Avandia did have a slightly higher risk of heart attack, although the increase was not statistically significant.

Diabetes researchers note that not all TZDs are the same. Actos, for instance, raises fewer concerns about heart attack in clinical studies and may be beneficial. It's possible that new agents under development which target PPAR-γ in a slightly different way might carry fewer risks.

References
1. Nissen, S. E. & Wolski, K. N. Engl. J. Med. 356, 2457–2471 (2007). | Article |
2. Krishnan, J. et al. Cell Metab. 9, 512–524 (2009). | Article |
3. Home, P. D. et al. Lancet 373, 2125 - 2135 (2009). | PubMed | ChemPort |

news20090624NTC2

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 22 June 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.589
News
Has NIH funding improved public health?
Increased funding for biomedical research boosts health and economy, researchers claim.
Heidi Ledford

An analysis of more than 50 years of research funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests that it has helped to avert up to 1.35 million deaths per year from four chronic diseases: cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

On the basis of this past success, the study — which was itself funded by the NIH — concludes that quadrupling NIH funding over the next decade could boost the US economy by extending the number of years that people can remain in work before retirement.

"If we expend more money and improve health, those people continue to work in all economic sectors, and then we may have a general economic stimulus," says Kenneth Manton, an applied mathematician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and lead author of the study. However, Manton admits that the analysis is only designed to reveal correlations between trends, and although it has found a possible relationship between NIH funding and public health, this does not prove that such a correlation exists. Other factors, such as greater wealth and improved access to health care from government programmes, could also have influenced mortality trends, he says.

"This is a paper that will provoke a great deal of debate," says Martin McKee, who studies European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "It's an ambitious attempt to try to explain an extremely complex phenomenon."

Cause and effect?
Manton and his colleagues tracked deaths from the four target diseases along with NIH funding for relevant institutes. Their analysis spanned from 1938, when the NIH was created, to 2004.

That period saw a wide range of significant health advances. For example, the Framingham Heart Study — which tracked the health of over 5,000 men and women from Framingham, Massachusetts — was launched in 1948 under the direction of the National Heart Institute (now called the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute). Years later, that study played a key part in establishing the cardiovascular benefits of controlling blood pressure and cholesterol levels — which has been a major factor in reducing the death rates from cardiovascular disease.

For cancer, one of the most significant advances was the official recognition of smoking's lethal consequences by the US surgeon general in 1962. The National Cancer Institute contributed significantly to mounting the case against smoking, as well as distributing that message to the community through its public health outreach programmes. "Of course, the tobacco companies had their own research," says Manton. "To deal with them, you had to have the scientific case extremely well nailed down."

Overall, Manton and his colleagues found that for three chronic diseases — cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cancer — death rates tended to decrease more rapidly roughly a decade after a spike in research funding for that particular area. For example, cancer deaths began to drop 14 years after the National Cancer Institute received a hike in funding in 1976. The results are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹.

Diabetes, however, did not fit the trend of a continuing decrease. Mortality rates from the disease decreased between 1970 and 1990, only to rise again since then. Manton attributes this pattern to the increase in obesity after 1980: "Not all of the changes in behaviour over the past 50 years have been positive," he says. When the researchers accounted for differences in obesity, they determined that diabetes deaths would have dropped from 17 per 100,000 people in 1980 to 9 per 100,000 in 2004.

On the basis of their findings, Manton argues that increases in NIH funding could benefit the economy by extending people's working lives. Sixteen years after deaths from cardiovascular disease and stroke began to drop, disability in the elderly population also declined, and a greater number of those over the age of 65 continued to work.

McKee points out, however, that grouping the research-funding data in different ways could have a significant impact on the results of the study.

"Certainly it's important not to consider cancer as a single disease," says McKee. Over the time period covered by the study, "the underlying cancer mortality and treatment trends for individual cancers are going in all different directions," he says. Even separating cancer deaths among women versus cancer deaths in men could affect the results, he adds.

And linking investment in research programmes directly to impacts on mortality rates carries a risk, notes Cary Gross, an associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. "The inference of this type of analysis is that scientific research is meaningful and economically important if it directly translates to better health," he says. "The opposite of that argument is that if scientific research does not directly relate to health, then it's not important."

"At the end of the day," Gross concludes, "I think we need to acknowledge that the NIH is primarily focused on basic research."

References
1. Manton, K.G. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.0905104106 (2009).

news20090624SLT

[Today's Paper] from [Slate Magazine]

Obama Changes Tune on Iran
By Daniel Politi
Posted Wednesday, June 24, 2009, at 6:42 AM ET

The New York Times (NYT), USA Today (USAT), and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) 's world-wide newsbox lead with, while the rest of the papers off-lead, President Obama delivering his harshest criticism of Iran's postelection crackdown of protesters. After days of criticism from Republican leaders who said the president wasn't showing enough support for the Iranian demonstrators, Obama said he was "appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings, and imprisonments of the past few days." Despite the tough words, Obama only took it so far. While stating that there are "significant questions about the legitimacy of the election," he emphasized the United States has no way of judging who really won. He also didn't mention any possible sanctions against the regime if it continued down its current path and, more importantly, refused to state that his administration was giving up on its goal to have talks with Iranian officials.

The Washington Post (WP) leads with news that the Metro subway train that crashed into another on Monday had its emergency brakes activated. Investigators also said the train was in automatic mode, which means that the train's computers should have stopped the train long before it got close to the stationary train. The paper also reports that the first two cars of the striking train were two months overdue for scheduled maintenance on its brakes. The Los Angeles Times leads (LAT) with a look at how a significant portion of the tactics that California's lawmakers and governor are proposing to deal with the state's fiscal crisis involve gimmicks that will only ensure the problem gets kicked down the road. What kind of gimmicks? Well, one proposal would have state employees receiving their June 2010 paychecks at 12:01 a.m. on July 1 so California would only have to meet 11 months of payroll in the new fiscal year.

The WSJ declares that Obama's comments about Iran yesterday "could mark the beginning of a significant shift in the White House's broader Middle East strategy." But administration officials were careful to emphasize that they're not quite there yet. While it seems pretty clear that there won't be any talks with Iranian officials about the nuclear program any time soon, that doesn't mean they couldn't take place later this year. Iran analysts warned that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might try to use Obama to gain legitimacy on the world stage by announcing he is ready to carry out nuclear negotiations with the United States.

The WP states that administration officials simply don't know how the postelection turmoil will affect the administration's efforts to negotiate with Iran. "We are going to monitor and see how this plays itself out before we make any judgments about how we proceed," Obama said. He also vehemently denied accusations that the United States was instigating the protests. "These accusations are patently false," he said. But he praised the demonstrators and even said he had watched the "heartbreaking" video that showed the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, noting that "anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about that."

In Tehran, things were "eerily quiet" (NYT) yesterday as the government continued its efforts to crack down on demonstrators. After the Guardian Council rejected claims of fraud, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said he would give the supervisory body another five days to actually certify the election. And while there are calls for more protests on the Internet, the opposition seems to be without any obvious leaders. The WP reports that "truckloads" of police descended on Tehran's main squares.

The NYT notes that the last time Mir Hossein Mousavi, the main opposition candidate, appeared in public was Thursday, and his last statement was issued Sunday. Mousavi's newspaper was raided yesterday and its staff was arrested. Adding to the media crackdown, a freelance reporter working for the Washington Times was arrested. Meanwhile, the WP notes that state media continued their campaign to blame the tumult on outside forces by broadcasting interviewers with "rioters" who confessed that they were influenced by Western news media. Even as demonstrators stayed of the streets, they still let their presence be felt by continuing to shout "God is great" and "Death to the dictator" at 10 p.m. "The protest has grown louder night after night," reports the NYT.

The papers go inside with news that a suspected CIA-operated drone aircraft carried out an air strike in South Waziristan that may have killed 60 people. The attack came during a funeral for a Taliban commander, and it may be the deadliest attack since the United States began using drones to attack Pakistan-based militants. The WP gets confirmation from a U.S. official who said that the missile strike killed "a large number" of suspected militants but didn't mention any exact numbers.

The NYT takes a front-page look at how a startup company, AltaRock Energy, is set to start drilling deep into the ground near San Francisco to tap geothermal energy using a nearly identical method that was used several years ago in Switzerland and abandoned after it set off an earthquake. The project in Basel not only set off one earthquake that damaged buildings but also led to "thousands of smaller earthquakes … that continued for months." AltaRock insists it can operate safely and its project in California will be the first of what could eventually be dozens of similar efforts in the United States to try to tap into what many think could be a great source for clean energy. But seismologists say there's no way of really knowing "what will or will not set off a major temblor."

The NYT fronts, and the rest of the papers go inside with, the new Richard Nixon White House tapes and documents that were made public for the first time yesterday. Among the highlights, the tapes capture Nixon's reaction to the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. In a conversation, Nixon said he worried abortions encouraged "permissiveness," but said they might be needed in some cases. "There are times when abortions are necessary. I know that," he said. "Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape." Notes also reveal that Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California at the time, seemed to approve of what would be later known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," when Nixon fired the special prosecutor looking into Watergate, an action that prompted the resignations of the attorney general and his deputy.

The WP's Dana Milbank writes about how reporters attending yesterday's White House news conference "looked at one another in amazement at the stagecraft they were witnessing" when Obama called on Nico Pitney from the Huffington Post. The White House had invited him and "told him the president was likely to call on him, with the understanding that he would ask a question about Iran that had been submitted online by an Iranian." Throughout Bush's presidency, "liberal outlets such as the Huffington Post often accused the White House of planting questioners in news conferences to ask preplanned questions," writes Milbank. "But here was Obama fielding a preplanned question asked by a planted questioner—from the Huffington Post."

The Post's Al Kamen reports that an "anonymous British philanthropist" paid $165,000 to buy a CD of Mikhail Gorbachev's singing. The former leader of the Soviet Union recorded Songs for Raisa in memory of his late wife and it was auctioned off to benefit the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation.